Interesting Ruby Tidbits That Don’t Need Separate Posts #29

Welcome to the latest installment in the series of compilation posts summarizing some of my latest findings in the world of all things Ruby. Let's tackle those links..

Alchemist: Easy Unit Conversion in Ruby

Alchemist is a new Ruby library that aims to take the pain out of performing translation with day to day units, such as miles, kilograms, kelvin, meters, and becquerels. There are a few ways you can perform conversions such as explicitly with a method: 8.meters.to.miles or inline: 10.kilometers + 1.mile. The library's source code is quite something to look at - there are units I've never even heard of before.

The Compleat Rubyist - An All-Star Ruby Training Event

David A Black, of The Well Grounded Rubyist fame, got in touch recently to promote his forthcoming The Compleat Rubyist training event. The instructors are David, Gregory Brown (of Ruby Best Practices fame), and Jeremy McAnally (of, well, lots of fame) and the event takes place on January 22-23, 2010 in Tampa, Florida. I initially wanted to do a series of interviews with the guys to help them spread the word but they'll come later (one word: newborn). Anyway, this is a great chance to learn a thing or two from three Ruby superstars.

A First Look at Rails 3.0

JRuby 1.4 Released

The latest significant release of JRuby, 1.4.0, is now available!(linked to a newsgroup announcement as jruby.org is down at the time of writing) The 1.4.0 release brings compatibility with Ruby 1.8.7p174, improved Java integration support, a Windows installer and native launcher, a new embedding framework, RubyGems 1.3.5, and a whole batch of bug fixes.

Hacking Gems With GitHub and GemCutter

Dr Nic Williams (who's proving rather popular in this post) asks: "Ever used a rubygem, found a bug, and just wanted to quickly bust out the big guns and fix it quickly? Surely, we all have.. so he's written Hacking someone's gem with github and gemcutter to show us how to easily fork an existing gem, make our changes, and get it deployed on Gemcuttertout de suite.

The Official GitHub Command Line Tool

I hadn't heard of it before, but Dr Nic Williams announced the release of version 0.4.0 of "github-gem", an official GitHub "command line helper for simplifying your GitHub experience." If you're a GitHub user, this looks extremely useful. You can quickly deal with patches made on any forks of your project, fetch downstream changes, and so forth.